Okaro launched in early January. The first month taught me more than six months of coding did.
First finding: paying users aren't drawn to feature-count. They're drawn to 'someone finally gets my problem.' I built freemium with 50 free transactions/month thinking most people would coast. Wrong. Paying users converted in week one. The reason every time: 'I don't have to open Excel anymore.'
Second finding: ASO is more brutal than I thought. v1 keywords were generic — 'bookkeeping budget investing finance.' Zero traffic. Switched to vertical long-tail — 'proxy buying multi-currency Japan credit card' — and downloads jumped. Lesson: don't PvP on generic terms. Find a phrase a tiny tribe self-identifies with.
Third finding: I rewrote the hero image. v1 was a pretty iPhone mockup. v2 was a literal Japanese receipt being OCR'd into the app, mid-action. Conversion 2x'd.
Fourth finding: highest churn cohort was 'free tier user for one month.' So I dropped the free tier from 50 to 30 transactions, plus a soft prompt at #25. Controversial, but ARPU rose.
5.0 stars — still holding. I know it lasts only until the first 1-star. But 30 days was enough to learn things that'll make the second product sharper.